“It wasn’t until early sunday afternoon, when he’d gone out in the station car to get the papers and ended up driving for miles, that the words “Forget it” rose to his lips.
It was a beautiful day. He was driving over the sunny crest of a long hill, past a thicket of elms whose leaves were just beginning to turn, when he suddenly began to laugh and to pound the old cracked plastic of the steering wheel with his fist. Forget it! What the hell was the point of thinking about it? The whole episode could now be dismissed as something separate and distinct from the main narrative flow of his life — something brief and minor and essentially comic.

And it was even worse than that: he was boring. He must have spent at least an hour talking about his half-assed job, and God only knew how many other hours on his other favorite subject: “my analyst this”; “my analyst that” — and he had turned into one of those people that want to tell you about their God damned analyst all the time. “And I mean I think we’re really getting down to some basic stuff; things I’ve never really faced before about my relationship with my father…”

She always ordered a margarita — rocks, no salt — despite its being technically forbidden for a diabetic.
“They live like they would live in their neighborhood”, Carson said of her tenants. “They still get to make poor choices for themselves if they choose.

… this is what the closing phase of a modern life often looks like — a mounting series of crises from which medicine can offer only brief and temporary rescue. She was experiencing what I have come to think of as the ODTAA syndrome: the syndrome of One Damn Thing After Another.